This paper analyses theoretically favouritism in recruitment decisions. We study the investments in connections by applicants for jobs which pay a wage rent and the behaviour of public or private managers intending to favour the recruitment of connected agents in place of more competent...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts’ judgments, sometimes coming under the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers’ choices or they are conferred to the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data of the most important...

We analyze to what extent physical attractiveness is related to lifetime economic outcomes through the marriage market, investigating whether individual height and weight affect the probability of marrying with a “high quality partner”, measuring quality with the partner’s educational...

We investigate to what extent crowd support contributes to the home advantage in soccer, disentangling this effect from other mechanisms such as players’ familiarity with the stadium and travel fatigue. To evaluate the relevance of crowd support in determining home advantage we analyze...

Using data for 9, 13 and 15-year-old students from three different datasets (PIRLS-2006, TIMSS-2007 and PISA-2009), we investigate whether the age at school entry affects children school performance at the fourth, eighth and tenth grade levels. Since student’s age in a grade may be endogenous,...

In this paper we analyze class size effects on college students exploiting data from a project offering special remedial courses in Mathematics and Language skills to freshmen enrolled at an Italian medium sized public University. To estimate the effects of class size we take advantage of the...

In this paper we study the impact of the degree of school competition on achievement of Italian students. Specifically, competition is measured as the number of schools available to students in a given area. The aim is to evaluate whether an increase in school choice improves the quality of...

We exploit a natural experiment based on the Italian promotion system for associate and full professor positions to investigate gender differences in the willingness to enter competition. Using data on about 42,000 professors and controlling for productivity and a number of individual and field...

This paper analyses theoretically favouritism in recruitment decisions. We study the investments in connections by applicants for jobs which pay a wage rent and the behaviour of public or private managers intending to favour the recruitment of connected agents in place of more competent...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts’ judgments, sometimes coming under the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers’ choices or they are conferred to the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data of the most important...